Saturday, August 2, 2014 at 7pm
Pier Paolo Pasolini's Outline of a Screenplay for a Film about Saint Paul (in the Form of Notes for a Production Director)
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Light Industry hosts a reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini's unrealized screenplay for a film about St. Paul, which is being published this summer in its first-ever English translation. Written relatively late in his career, between the time of his work on Teorema and Salò, it is less a traditional scenario than an evocative treatment, broken down into 112 brief, poetic descriptions of shots and sequences. As with Pasolini's earlier Gospel According to St. Matthew, the piece reclaims a key episode of the New Testament and reveals the revolutionary political potential of its message. Yet unlike Matthew, the backdrop for this project is not Biblical but modern. "Pasolini's wager," Alain Badiou notes, "is that the truth of which St. Paul is the divided bearer, the sacrificed militant, can make sense in the world of today, thus providing the latent universality of his thought. We can see the United States in place of Rome, the intellectual snobs of Rome (whom Pasolini hated) in place of the philosophers of the Athenian agora, or echoes of collaboration and the Resistance in France: Paul's text crosses all these circumstances intact, as if it had foreseen them all."

Put another way, as Pasolini himself did, "Saint Paul is here, today, among us...it is our society that he addresses; it is our society for which he weeps and that he loves, threatens and forgives, assaults and tenderly embraces."